As a teenager, I remember being greatly marked, among other things, by the attempt at pizza at McDonald’s, the mystery of Mariah Carey’s voice which had lifted a garage door and the 1993 Stanley Cup… But also by all that which was more intense and bigger than just my life.
It was a time when emotions of all kinds multiplied in my emerging adult life. And among these emotions: the superb novel The Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
Having grown up in the suburbs of Quebec, which had none of the mystery and obscure wonders of the Yorkshire moors, and despite a happy and peaceful childhood, the beginning of the book had already intrigued me when it spoke of “a place so perfectly removed from the flow of the world” where a heartbreaking passion was lived… And where this life, as Aragon wrote, “will have passed like a great sad castle that all the winds cross”.
I had underestimated and never felt with such force what the universe of the wind in a vast and bare landscape imposes, until a recent stay for a shoot in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, where the ambient weather took me back to the heart of Wuthering Heights. Above all, in what this writing had once taught me intellectually, and in the memory that it revived, physically this time.
It was in May in a landscape as magnificent as it was enigmatic, and the wind, the rain, the cold which did not let up, placed me in a constant physical battle which first taught me, we must admit, humility.
Cheeks numbed by the cold, whipped by the wind, hair constantly disheveled, indomitable, such strength that I could almost feel my own body flying away. I swear I’m not exaggerating!
I could not help but be disturbed by its intensity. To comfort myself, I had the reflex of wanting to give an inspiring meaning to this tough wind: it was bound to bring me renewal, make me proud and resilient like the great red cliffs that border the sea!
Like everyone, I needed meaning: we need the sea to “wash us of our problems”, the sun to “warm our hearts”, the wind to “drive away the bad”…
I needed him to bring good news, profound things, or otherwise calm down!
In short, on the Islands, all the discussions between the film crew and the locals were all the rage, and as Alain Corbin writes in his book The gust and the zephyr : “We wish it, we implore it or we insults him. It is a regretted presence or absence. Sometimes, when it stops, a feeling of absence sets in. He who filled a void with his breath then makes us feel the silence that his interruption imposes. »
It’s all there, the great story of humanity: we no longer want it, then we miss it.
The wind that makes us feel free is also the one that makes us scares and the one who does good is the same one who destroys: “The wind that is good is the same that tears away” and “I promise, I promise that the day that is coming is brand new”, sang Avec pas d’ helmet. A refrain that I myself screamed in my car, hair blowing in the wind, hope filling my heart…
Faced with the squalls that unleashed the sea, alone with myself, the wind also taught me that the void almost no longer exists, that it has been colonized.
He taught me that faced with this emptiness, humans always seek movement, and that they will do anything to have it: “It is vain to say that human beings should be satisfied with tranquility; they need action and if they can’t find it, they will create it,” said Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s sister. We have a visceral need that life is not trivial, that it is bigger, more extraordinary than us.
The French poet Leconte de Lisle wrote that “the terrible winds are here, land winds, driven by a violence which is that of vengeance and punishment, sometimes the bearers of horror, of injustice, of misfortune” and he taught me the inner winds…
This is perhaps the most important point: he showed me that hatred begets hatred and that it has no end… In the same way that, in The Wuthering Heights, not obeying any law, the real wind that blows is that of vengeance and hatred that inhabit Heathcliff’s heart.
And he’s the one who screams and blows the loudest.
Since he will be there again and always, I can ultimately only hope that our collective wind is no longer the one that blows the strongest, often carrying hatred and destruction, but on the contrary, that it is the one that reveals what is most magnificent in our openness to life and to others. May it be the bearer of positive enigmas and liberating worlds where we will all sing in unison, like Bob Dylan, in response to our questions: “ The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind… »
I finish writing and, in the calm of the living room, my stepchildren, shells in hand, watch a Hayao Miyazaki film and this sentence from Paul Valéry resonates: “The wind is rising!… We must try to live ! »
Indeed, we must try to live.
What a fight.
What luck.